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When an explosion up the block sent an apartment building crashing down on his head and he told Karen and Mrs. Cardenas to "get help," Foggy meant help like fire fighters and paramedics. He certainly didn't mean his best friend crawling through the rubble looking like something the cat dragged in, with scratches on the side of his face, and big, ugly rips in the sleeves of his suit jacket, the last nice one from the old days at Landman & Zack.
He didn't mean for help to be synonymous with Matt Murdock, but he was glad that it was. He didn't doubt that Karen was trying to round up professional medical help for him, since Matt had made it pretty clear that nobody asked him to come, and somebody asking him to leave and choose safety over a crumbling building wasn't likely to be effective.
And, yeah, okay, Foggy wasn't crazy about his best friend using a little old lady's dental floss and a sewing needle to suture the wound in his side for him, but between dental floss and bleeding out, he'd take the weird, yet effective suture material improvised by his blind best friend, who could smell mint through rubble and God, he hoped there wasn't asbestos in here.
He coughed at the thought. It was entirely too late to be worrying about that, of course, and the immediate concern should have been the penetrating wound in his side. Was it deep? It felt deep. He should ask Matt. He shouldn't ask Matt. He wouldn't be able to see it anyway and Foggy didn't really want his best friend sticking his fingers inside an open wound to check. It was fine. Probably.
"You're… weirdly good at that," Foggy observed as Matt tied off another suture. "Sorry. I mean weirdly as a compliment."
Matt gave a soft half-smile. "Thank you."
"So what's the prognosis, Doc?" he said when he could think of nothing else to say and the awkwardness of his best friend touching his naked torso was getting a bit too much to not comment on.
"You'll be fine," Matt murmured; Foggy gave a short, forced exhale when the needle bit into his flesh again.
"You could say that with a bit more delight in your tone," he said lightly, trying to inject humor into his voice so that he didn't have to think about the seriousness of the situation. "You know, like, oh thank God, Foggy is going to live thanks to my weirdly amazing medical skills."
Matt scoffed. "It's not weirdly amazing."
"Trust me, it is," Foggy admitted with fervent admiration (and, oh God, was his crush showing?) "I would have no idea what to do. I'd just end up crying hysterically and calling 9-1-1."
"Hysterically, huh?" Matt said quietly, still focused on the wound that Foggy was trying super hard not to look at or actively think about.
"Evasive, huh?" he quipped back.
"I'm not evasive," Matt said, his tone carefully measured, a match for the cautious yet certain way he drew dental floss through the wound for what was surely the fourth or fifth improvised suture. "I'm concentrating."
That was entirely valid and Foggy sighed wearily. "I rest my case, Your Honor."
He was pretty sure that whatever adrenaline had coursed through him when the apartment started crashing down around his ears was fading now. Or faded. Gone. He was so tired. God, tired didn't even come close to describing this. He was going to take a week off and not chide Matt at all if he decided to do the same thing.
Matt tapped his cheek gently and Foggy's eyelids fluttered as his best friend softly intoned, "Hey. You have to stay awake, remember?"
"Right," Foggy mumbled, his tone reluctant. "Sorry. It must be the blood loss."
"Or it's just after one a.m. and you're tired," Matt suggested with the kind of self-satisfied smile that told Foggy he wasn't in any immediate danger of, you know, dying on the floor of some crappy apartment.
"Or that," he readily agreed as Matt's fingers skated the edge of his wound, measuring space between sutures with butterfly soft touches. "Are you really not gonna tell me how you learned to do perfect sutures without even needing to see that the needle's going in the right spot?"
Matt shrugged and said modestly, "I learned how to suture when I was sighted. This is just… the best I can do until we can get help."
"Ah, my humble hero. That's still not an answer," Foggy teased but Matt stayed silent, no doubt concentrating again. "So you were sighted. That puts you at eight, nine years old, tops. Medical schools don't take applicants that young. They can't even reach the operating table."
Matt snorted, still checking his work. "I used to stitch my dad up after fights. We couldn't afford to send him to the ER every week. Or ever."
"Your dad," Foggy repeated thoughtfully. "That makes sense. Hey, can I ask you something about him?"
Matt didn't reply. He didn't give him an answer either way or even show any indication that he'd heard him. The needle bit into him again in what Foggy privately hoped was his last suture with dental floss ever. He remembered having sutures in two of his fingers as a teenager when he'd been helping his dad in the butcher shop and misjudged the distance between a cut of steak and his hand. It hadn't been anywhere near as awkward or protracted as this.
"You talk a lot about your dad being a boxer, but I've never heard you talk about him being, like, a dad," he commented, holding back a wince with difficulty.
Matt frowned. "That's not a question. That's an observation."
"Okay," Foggy said with an impatient little huff. "Do you have any comments on my observation, Doctor Murdock?"
Matt hesitated and said, "None that are… nice."
"Okay. I'll take not nice then," Foggy quickly volunteered. "I can trash a parent. Did I tell you about the time my dad forgot to pick Theo and I up from school?"
"No," Matt answered, carefully tying off the suture. "And it isn't small like that."
"I had to walk, Matt!" Foggy exclaimed with just a touch of melodrama. "Through a very sketchy neighborhood! Don't trivialize my traumatic experience. I had to eat ice cream for dinner, I was so frightened."
"My apologies," Matt replied with a nostalgic smile. "He was a good dad —"
"That is not what Theo and I said to him," Foggy muttered under his breath, but then he noted Matt's strained expression. "Sorry. You were being serious. Go on."
Matt didn't though. He didn't go on. Foggy suspected that he wouldn't. Matt just had that look about him, the look that said 'I want to share this part of myself with you, but my issues have issues and I don't feel secure enough to.' That look broke Foggy's heart every single time.
"You know those kids that blame themselves when one of their parents leaves?" Matt said so softly that Foggy almost didn't hear him. "Well, both of mine left and…"
Foggy sighed. "You blamed yourself?"
"I never really stopped," Matt admitted, beginning to improvise a bandage with a clean sock and pantyhose that he found in an upturned laundry basket. "It was different with my dad. Sometimes it didn't feel like… it felt more like we were a team. But then I lost my vision and… things got harder and… I always felt like he gave up on me. Like boxing was easier than being a dad. And in the end that was what he chose. Glory over me. He was a good dad until he wasn't." He sighed and knotted the pantyhose around Foggy's middle. "We're done here."
Foggy didn't move. "He didn't leave, Matt. He died. He didn't choose —"
"He did," Matt said quickly. "He knew what would happen. He did choose, Foggy. He didn't choose me. At the orphanage… nobody chose me either. Nobody who wanted a kid wanted… me."
"I did," Foggy murmured, looking up at him with a sigh. "Not wanted a kid. I meant, chose you."
"I know that," Matt mumbled, sitting back on his heels. "I'm being… the pity party stops now. I promise. I'm sorry."
He shook his head, no doubt beating himself up internally for actually voicing how he felt about things. God forbid. Foggy slowly sat up, suppressing a wince, a pointless exercise in itself since Matt couldn't see it. Or maybe not so pointless. Matt seemed to have a unique gift for reading silences and hesitations and interpreting them accurately anyway.
"You wouldn't lose me even if it didn't stop, you know," he said to the floor, not trusting himself to look at Matt. "You could tell me every bitter thought in your head and I'd still be here."
"Well, yeah, we're trapped in here with nowhere to go. It's like a war zone out there," Matt pointed out.
"Even if we weren't," Foggy insisted, looking up in time to catch the pensive (and oh-so-guilty) look that flashed across Matt's face. "Hey, what aren't you telling me?"
Matt shook his head. "Nothing."
"Matt," Foggy said with a sigh, knowing better than to push the matter, but also knowing that sometimes Matt carried burdens alone that he simply didn't have to.
Perhaps thirty seconds of awkwardness passed before Matt ventured cautiously, "Do you ever feel like… you've controlled the narrative in your friendships? Let them see only the parts of you that you think they'd find acceptable? And because of that… I want it to be real and I'm scared that it isn't."
"Then show me the ugly parts," Foggy pleaded, laying his hands on the ripped, tattered sleeves that covered Matt's forearms. "As if you even have any. See?" he added when Matt didn't speak. "Sorry. I told you. You can't think of a single—"
"I have heightened senses," Matt blurted out, his voice quick and low. "I've had them since the accident when I was nine. That's how I knew where to place the needle. It was more than luck. That was how I found you tonight. I could hear your heartbeat."
Foggy gaped at him for a moment before he found his voice. "Matt, that's not ugly. That's amazing."
Matt shook his head, his expression anguished as he confessed, "I'm the Masked Man."
Foggy's eyebrows shot up and he scrambled for reassurances even as his mind reeled. "That's …concerning, but I'm not leaving. Even if I could, I wouldn't."
"That's easy to say now," Matt pointed out in a thoroughly unimpressed tone.
"Then we'll test it later," Foggy said quietly and Matt nodded.
He didn't pull away though. Foggy was afraid that he would, that the arms he held onto would slip away and that Matt would go with them to brood and obsess in silence. He had to choose at that moment: to trust that he and Matt would find a way forward or that Matt would be proved right in attempting to shield him from what he perceived in himself as ugly and unacceptable.
"I love you, Foggy," Matt said quietly, seeming determined to bare all now that he'd begun. "I always have. No matter what that means."
Foggy sighed and smiled wearily. "It means that Marci was right. She told me back in college that's why it'd never work with me and her. I… thought she was just jealous of how close we are."
"She might've been," Matt conceded, the quaver in his voice betraying his charming facade. "She also wasn't wrong though."
Matt ducked his head and Foggy shuffled closer. "Hey. I'm still here."
"For now," Matt mumbled, tears shining on his cheeks when he raised his head.
"Forever," Foggy insisted, not knowing what he could do to convince Matt of this. "I know that's just words to you. You want to do big, scary secrets?" He hesitated and almost changed his mind, finding that false bravado didn't suit him as much he'd hoped and determining to tell Matt because he trusted him, because he believed that tortured Catholic that he was, Matt was a safe person to tell. "I'm bi and I cannot remember a time when I didn't have a massive crush on you. You want more than words? You want action? I can do action."
False bravado as it turned out, while terrifying at first, did in fact suit Foggy just fine. It wasn't just for heroes and lawyers relying on the thinnest legal arguments ever known to man. It was for people like him, people who had been too afraid to make the first move for years and now found themselves locking lips with their best friend and kissing him like the world was ending.
He pulled back and said breathlessly, "I'm not leaving you… ever. You said that you can hear my heartbeat. Can you tell when I'm telling the truth?"
Matt nodded and bit his lip. "Yes."
Foggy cupped his cheek and said bravely, "I love you too and I'm not leaving. Am I lying?"
"No," Matt whispered with something like relief.
He kissed him again, tentatively, as if half expecting to be refused, or perhaps mindful of the fact that Foggy had a freshly sutured wound to contend with. Whatever the reason, Matt's soft, tender kisses were the most precious things in the world to Foggy, who held him as close as he dared and vowed to himself that he'd never leave his side, no matter what.